For great ills, great remedies. You still have to use the right words. The Minister of the Interior seems to have a slight tendency to exaggerate the facts. We saw this last Friday, when he mentioned – wrongly – “a brawl between rival gangs” between “several hundred people”, after the death of a 15-year-old young man in Poitiers.
According to the police and the prosecution, brief scuffles did break out but they only involved a few dozen people among the crowd present near the crime scene. So, is Bruno Retailleau right when he speaks of a risk of “Mexicanization” of France? Or is this, once again, a ministerial abuse of language?
We must first remember that we are killing each other less and less in our country, according to data from the Ministry of the Interior. In 1994, 1,406 murders were recorded by the police and gendarmerie services, or a rate of 2.44 per 100,000 inhabitants. In 2023, there will be 996, or 1.41 times less, with a rate of 1.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. However, according to a report from the SSMSI published last July, their number, which had decreased between 2016 (911) and 2020 (823), has been increasing for three years. It increased by 4% last year, with 37 additional victims compared to 2022. Note that 33% (85 victims) of the 284 women who were killed last year were “victims of their spouse”.
31 times more homicides in Mexico
The judicial police, on the other hand, are observing an increase in settling of scores. It counted 85 victims in 2023 compared to 67 in 2022, an increase of 20%. In Marseille alone, the public prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone, counted 49 last year. “More than 90% of cases of assassinations or attempted assassinations can be explained by disputes between drug traffickers,” he recently explained to 20 Minutes Yann Sourisseau, head of the Central Office for the Fight against Organized Crime (Oclco). Between January and June 2024, 42 people were killed in France. A figure down compared to the first six months of 2023, which was a “particularly criminogenic” year. But an increase of 22% compared to 2022 and 32% compared to 2021.
The Mexican authorities, for their part, recorded 30,968 homicides in 2022. In this country of around 128 million inhabitants (1.88 times more than France), there are 85 murders per day on average, compared to 2.7 in the 'Hexagon. A specialist in Latin America, journalist Frédéric Saliba knows the region well, in particular this country in which he lived and worked for fourteen years as a correspondent for The World. “Strictly speaking, no, there is no Mexicanization, because Mexico is much more exposed to violence than France,” explains to 20 Minutes the one who published last September the book Cartels, Journey to the land of Narcos (Ed. du Rocher). He particularly remembers, when he arrived there in 2006, that “five severed heads had been thrown into a nightclub”. “We were all stunned, whereas today it is sadly commonplace. » At the time, President Felipe Calderon launched a military offensive against drug traffickers. “In eighteen years there have been more than 450,000 deaths and almost 100,000 missing,” emphasizes Frédéric Saliba.
Kalachs, corruption and child killers
The journalist nevertheless observes “similarities” in the methods used by drug traffickers on both sides of the Atlantic, “alert points which raise questions”. “In Mexico, there is fertile ground for the development of organized crime; 43% of the population is poor, young people from working-class backgrounds are easy prey for the mafiosi,” he notes, comparing this social situation “to the northern districts of Marseille.” It turns out that “organized crime recruits very easily”.
The weapons used by the criminals “are the same, Kalashnikovs – in Mexico we talk about AK-47”. They are used “by younger and younger people. In Mexico, we talk about new hitmenchild killers. But in France, we also see that there are many minors used at deal points or as killers.”
Another point in common with this North American country, “there is an explosion of corruption in France, we see it a lot in the ports”, underlines Frédéric Saliba. In its conclusions, the Senate commission of inquiry into the impact of drug trafficking in France was also alarmed by “the emergence, still embryonic but no less worrying, of corruption of public and private officials”. “The situation is still far from the corruptive phenomenon observed in certain countries in Europe or South America,” the authors of this report nuanced.
The limits of “all repressive”
Like the narcos in Mexico, French traffickers no longer hesitate to commit atrocities and to make it known “to frighten their adversaries”. Like last October in Marseille, when a 15-year-old teenager was stabbed around fifty times before being burned alive by members of a rival gang from the Félix-Pyat city. “It is also a way of sending a message to the population to terrify them and maintain the secrecy that criminal organizations need,” analyzes Frédéric Saliba.
In another case, the DZ Mafia, one of the organizations which runs the deal points in the Marseille city, published a video in which it claimed to be unrelated to the murder of a VTC driver committed by a 14-year-old boy. “Many Mexican cartels communicate like this, by claiming responsibility for a crime or, on the contrary, by clearing themselves. All they needed were weapons. In Mexico, individuals sometimes have rocket launchers or other heavy weapons,” notes the journalist. He also notes that “the gangs in France – we can't really talk about cartels yet – are increasingly practicing kidnapping, which is a very Mexican practice.” He notes that “Latina narcoculture has spread in particular with Netflix series like Narcos from which criminals draw inspiration.
France, he concludes, “is not a narco state […] We are not in the situation of Mexico. But if we don't do anything, we could be there in a few years. » He regrets that the response is often police or judicial, when it should be “much more global”. The “totally repressive” seems, on both sides of the ocean, to show its limits, having “dramatic incidences and consequences”.
* « Cartels, Voyage au pays des Narcos”, by Frédéric Saliba, published on September 4, 2024 by Editions du Rocher, 416 pages, 19.90 euros.
